The InfluxDB is a time series database from InfluxData headquartered in San Francisco. As an observability solution, it is designed to provide real-time visibility into stacks, sensors and systems. It is available open source, via the Cloud as a DBaaS option, or through an Enterprise subscription.
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Sumo Logic
Score 7.2 out of 10
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Sumo Logic is a log management offering from the San Francisco based company of the same name.
InfluxDB is very good at storing monitoring metrics (e.g. performance data). InfluxDB is not the right choice if you need to store other data types (like plain text, data relations etc.).
SumoLogic is a fantastic log aggregator and analysis tool, a fine alternative to Splunk. Searching is powerful and mostly intuitive and results come fast. If you have application logs in clusters or Kubernetes pods that lose their logs every time they're restarted, Sumo is the solution for you
Sumo Logic allowed for our InfoSec team to ingest logs from our CDN directly, in real-time, instead of massive compressed archives that were sent every two-hours (the only alternative at the time). Sumo Logic had an app for these logs, that allowed us to easily get an immediate payoff from the data, with canned dashboard and saved searches.
Sumo Logic has a fairly extensive REST API when it comes to log sources, source configurations, dashboard data, searches, etc. Their wiki for the API is usually kept up to date.
Sumo Logic, during the period of time I had used their product, had added the ability to configure agents via configuration files. This allowed customers to configure their endpoints, and modify the endpoints, with configuration management tools like Chef / Puppet / Salt. Beforehand, the only option was to always make changes either via the web portal or REST API.
The solutions engineers were extremely helpful, and easily reachable when issues would occur.
Users at our company found it easy to get started, working on new dashboards, scheduled searches, and alerting. The alerting worked well with our third-party paging tool.
InfluxDB is a near perfect product for time series database engines. The relatively small list of cons are heavily outweighed by it's ability to just work and be a very flexible and powerful database engine. The community and support provided by the corporation are the only areas I have little experience.
Sumo Logic is very powerful but definitely requires some configuration work to get the most out of it. You can get a certification related to this, but it is definitely not something you can just throw together.
We have worked with the InfluxDB support team a few times so far and it has been positive. Issues submitted are worked on promptly and we have good feedback.
I would give this rating because I attended a free Sumo Logic training at a WeWork in Chicago. I found the training very useful, and I learned a lot of features that I was not aware of before I went to the training. I like the idea that SumoLogic provides free training seminars. I am certified in level1, and I plan on certifying to level2.
I was satisfied with the implementation, as at the time, it was the best way to implement the product with the available feature sets in Sumo Logic. User creation and management became more of an issue during continued use, instead of it being an issue related to deploying the product in our environment.
To be honest, I didn't look at alternatives since InfluxDB performs very well if you can oversee the lack of security and HA features. But for all challenges, there is an easy solution which brings you forward (e.g. read load balancing can be achieved by using a common HTTPS load balancer).
Sumo Logic works very well out of the gate. For a small business it has given us what we need. I worked at a larger company previously, and we produced so many logs we had to create a custom logging service to handle them all. Cost and availability are big issues when deciding between the different services, whether self maintained and hosted, or provided by another company.
